Marketing workflows and approvals, Leap 2020 (July 1, 2020)

Transcript

All right, well hey, thanks everyone for joining us today for this post virtual LEAP user group session for marketing workflows and approvals. Thank you, really look forward to some quality interaction. So if you have an opportunity to turn on your video, we’d love to see you, but you guys are in control of your own video and your own audio within your Zoom. So as we get started, just wanna let everyone know that this session is being recorded and will be made available to the customers after the event. So that way, if you have your hair all ready to go, we’d love to see you. And just know that you’re gonna be recorded. So this is going into interim for me. All right, so I am your, my name’s Brett Frederick and I am a strategic customer success manager here for Workfront. I’ve been with Workfront for just about, just over six months. So still learning the ropes and I love hosting these so that I can learn from our customers as well. So I know we’ve got a session, so I try not to take too much time. But before we kick off, a few housekeeping notes. As I mentioned, you have your audio and video control of your own screen through Zoom. So the audio control and video there. You’ll see the chat icon as well. We’re gonna use that feature here in just a moment. So please know where that chat feature is. And if you wanna see all the participants, when you click on participants, you can see the entire list of names. To see the videos, there is a piece, and typically in the upper right hand section of your Zoom called gallery view. If you change that from speaker view to gallery view, you’ll be able to see everyone who is sharing their videos. And then for folks that are not, you’ll see their name. So just keep that in mind, we’d love to see you. And speaking of that chat feature, normally in our user groups, we love to go around the room and get everyone introduced and really learn from who folks are and where they are. But in the chat, what we would love for you to do is we’re gonna see your name automatically. So just put the name, the company, the role, and maybe what location you’re from. We don’t have a whole lot of time to go through all the chats, but something to keep it light and fun. If you don’t mind sharing, where did you go for your first date? Kind of the icebreaker, maybe a skating rink, maybe a ball game, maybe a movie, some restaurant. But think about that and let us know what that is. So we’ll take a look through those and we’d love to see that. As we’re going through that, it looks like we have a special guest in the room today. I’d like to introduce Heidi Malin. She is our Chief Marketing Officer. Thank you for joining us, Heidi. Brett, thanks. It’s exciting to be here today. I love the new format for the virtual user groups and this topic that you all are gonna spend some time drilling into on workflows and approvals. That is obviously a topic that is critical to all marketing team members and is one that is obviously near and dear to my heart. And so I’m thrilled to kick off this virtual LEAP follow-up special user group and thrilled to listen in on your perspectives and your input on this really critical topic. So I will turn it back over to you, Brett, to get us started.

Thank you, Heidi. And again, thanks for joining. As I scrolled through some of the Zoom chats to see one of them caught my eye, which was fireworks on the 1st of July from Aurora. What a fun event to go to, right? And so we just had some fireworks last weekend and really look forward to what’s going on. I know some places are canceling them, but other groups are. So thank you for sharing those. Anybody else find some really interesting, ooh, sushi? Fort Worth, Texas, thank you. Marketplace restaurant, a lot of restaurants.

Sioux Falls, oh, picnic, nice, nice. A movie and a double date, very good. Well, thank you everyone for sharing those. Feel free to look through those if you have any questions about, but ideally it’s understanding where folks are from. And if you want to connect later, you’ll have an opportunity to do that through our community. So you’ll have access to that chat. Let me get to my next screen. Because what we’re gonna do today, the housekeeping and welcoming, I think we’ve already made it through that. We’re right on time here because we’re gonna eventually turn it over to Katie for the presentation. And then we’re gonna break into some group discussion. So once we get through Katie’s presentation, we’re gonna break into some smaller groups where you’ll have a little bit more of an opportunity to really come together with that group, get into some better discussion points or ask some questions, we’ll go from there. We’ll come back from those group discussions with a quick little wrap up and next steps. And then we’ll conclude this by noon Eastern time. So we’ll get you guys on your way. And with that, I would like to turn it over to Katie. I’m gonna go ahead and stop sharing my screen so Heidi can take over.

I’m sorry, so Katie can take over. Heidi’s like, wait, I’m not sharing anything. Go ahead, Katie, sorry. No worries, thanks so much, Brett. Hoping everybody can see the screen properly. And thank you for coming this morning. I’m really excited to give this little excerpt from my lead presentation because it fits in really nicely with the discussion about marketing workflows and approvals. One thing I do wanna say, we’ve got a short amount of time, so I’m gonna be going through a good amount of info. If you wanna go into any greater detail or go into the nut of it, I would direct you to the lead presentation. It’s called, can we do that beyond internal work management? That being said, as Brett mentioned, my name is Katie Hayes. I am the manager of program analytics and, excuse me, business analytics and program operations at the Channel Company in Westboro, Massachusetts. We’re right about now, it’s maybe a thousand percent humidity, so it’s just an insane day. Going through quickly, what we’re gonna be focusing on today is we’re gonna walk through a use case that provides a really decent example of approaching fairly complex manual process and translating that into an automated workflow with approval processes. And basically in that approach, some best practices and things to look out for and what we ran into in our experience at the Channel Company.

So I do need to provide a little bit of context about the Channel Company because as the name, most people think, are you television channels? What does that mean? The Channel Company consists of four primary business units, all revolving around the channel. And what I mean by the channel is that is the IT vertical in a wide sense. That means it includes vendors who create products that could be networking, storage, cloud, internet of things, any piece of tech, a vendor who makes that is part of the channel. But it also includes solution providers. Those are the organizations that take those products and connect them to end users. And in this case, an end user would be an IT decision maker in any organization, a hospital, a university, a manufacturing firm across all verticals.

So when we’re talking about the Channel Company, what we specifically do in the channel is we’re focused on accelerating sales and marketing within the channel. And that means to and through partners as well as to the customers, it’s a very wide ecosystem. Now with that in mind, that kind of feeds into when we’re talking about our use case. And I wanna clarify, we’ve got two instances of Workfront at the Channel Company. One is our internal instance that opened up in I think it was late 2017, maybe November. We started with one department and then it fed through the remainder of the company. Last year, however, we added a second instance. And that second instance was launched specifically by one of our business units, our internal in-house marketing agency. And that was on behalf of a client. Now, when I say that the use case really is we offered work management as a service to one of our clients. And let me just give you a little background of this so that their workflows make sense. This client is a global entity within the channel. They manufacture a product. They have marketing programs that they support for their partners. Their partners are the ones that actually go sell, service and support their products to the end users. They had a manual process that was filled with a whole lot of bottlenecks, a lot of miscommunication, a lot of delays that was a headache for them. So our second instance was Channel Company taking the operational piece of their process and automating it for them by using Workfront. So that’s what we’re gonna focus in on today rather than our internal instance at the Channel Company.

So to give you an idea of who is in this second instance, we not only have our program manager from the Channel Company, we have the client’s leadership team, we have their regional marketing managers, and we also have their partners.

I’m not gonna go through the itemization of what they have, but here’s the breakdown. You’re welcome to look at it after the presentation. But I do wanna call out, you’ll notice the majority of users in this instance are using a review license. That’s important to note because it really did play into how we approached automating their process into a workflow. We needed to keep that as a consideration.

So when I’m talking about process considerations, the first thing we did is we needed to understand the context behind the client’s process. And that was crucial so that we could do an accurate job of building their workflows. So the first thing we needed to keep in mind is that the client stakeholders and all their partners are located around the globe.

Additionally, the partner oversees their partners based on region and organization type. And what I mean by that is they have regional marketing managers. They have one for APJ, they have another for EMEA, another for Latin America. They basically have visibility within a specific region. But depending upon what’s being done in a marketing program, if there is some type of a specific type of content, that’s another group that they would have visibility over. They also have different visibility within their organization for specific types of organizations. So it was really fairly complex on who needed to see what, who needed to be involved in visibility and approvals.

On top of that, as I mentioned, additional stakeholders would require visibility and access based on their marketing activity. If it was an enhancement or an engagement activity, there are specific stakeholders that needed to be involved in the process.

Since this is a global entity, we are talking about multiple native languages, as well as time zones that we needed to be mindful of in setting up our workflows.

On top of that, like most marketing programs are all familiar with, they are deadline driven and there is financial tracking that was involved.

So that being said, the first thing we needed to do is focus on the high level, what are the big pieces of the processes we need to translate into a workflow? We broke it in half between intake and execution. That was our major grouping. And from there, we then mapped out the steps.

Now in this intake process, the first thing like many intake processes is we needed to have a proposal submission. Partners submit their marketing campaign proposals in to our client. We translated that into using a request queue. But one thing we needed to do in that request queue is, when proposals come in, they need to be directed to the right regional marketing manager. And to handle that, we set up routing rules so that when something came in from Latin America, it went not only to the channel company program manager, but the Latin American regional marketing manager was also aware that one of their partners just submitted a proposal.

Now, the next step that we needed to think about is when those proposals came in, we needed to have approval processes that not only were mindful of the region, but we also needed to know if there was any type of approval coming in, all of the appropriate stakeholders needed to be involved in that. So in my earlier example, if a Latin American proposal came in, that regional marketing manager is in that routing rule, but that queue setup had the approval for, approval, excuse me, that approval process that included the correct marketing manager. So no matter where you’re coming in from, if you submit your proposal, it’s gonna go right to the correct person. And the people who need to make the approvals will get visibility.

We also needed to provide progress visibility, not only for the partners themselves, but for all stakeholders within our client. They needed to know, were there any hangups with someone not acting on an approval had something just come in. From the user perspective, the partners rather, we needed to make sure that when they got notifications from Workfront, it came by email in their native language. So for that, we leveraged the account locale, and we also use time zones. So the information they got would be accurate as well.

The next major bucket for the process we focused on was the execution piece. And what we needed to think about here, in the execution piece, it means that their proposal has been reviewed and approved. They were given the green light to go develop and put their marketing program in market. We needed at this point to give them some type of campaign oversight. So we had a link in for internal purposes, when that project was converted, that date triggered our internal action. So we knew financial actions needed to take place. We also needed to know when reporting internally should be generated. We use that as a trigger point.

Within execution, partners need to come around and say, okay, great, we’ve been in the market, here is our POP or proof of performance they needed to provide. It could be invoices, it could be photographs, it could be receipts, anything like that. We needed to be able to communicate to them. But also partners needed to know when do I have to deliver this into you? So to provide them visibility on that due date, we set up reporting that was customized, whether you’re a partner, whether you’re internal. And that would allow them to see when they have to take action on that.

In terms of delivering that POP, it’s simply a case where partners would upload to a doc, excuse me, upload to a task that they were assigned on, any piece of performance that was required.

When we’re talking that review and approval, it’s kind of similar to the proposal submission. We really had to look for multiple stage task approval processes. First, our internal program manager would look at it, review it, when she approves, it then moves on to the regional marketing manager. By using custom statuses, if there were specific stakeholders, for example, if there was an engagement type of program, then depending upon who is clicking the approval process, it’s triggered by that custom status to this external stakeholder. So whatever the case may be, we were able to customize who needed to see it, who needed to approve it, and things moved one by one by one, seamlessly to the correct person.

And speaking of that progress, visibility, really every user group needed to have specific visibility. From a partner perspective, they needed to know who was looking at my POP. Is it finished yet? Did we get it signed off? Internally, the regional marketing managers needed to know, do I need to take action? Has this approval come to me, or is it the person in front of me? From the client’s executive team, they needed to see where things were. Were the proposals coming, excuse me, the POPs coming in on time? Did any of the executives need to step in because there was a bottleneck, maybe a regional marketing manager was not able to get to the approval on time? So we were able to use custom reporting for that based upon the rules, the roles. And again, this was a case, where we also be by leveraging the account locale and time zones, any notifications going out, either to the partners or any of our clients were in their native language, they could take action and get accurate information.

So our approach to the process automation, I mentioned we really started by at a high level, bucketing it into two major groups, the intake and the execution piece. We really started by talking through it before we took pen to paper, before we started building anything and work from it, because it was such a complex process. And because there were so many bottlenecks and what ifs, and this isn’t working, talking it through was critical to have as our first step. We focused in on the core process. What do we need to think about for intake? What do we need to think about for execution? We need to break it down sequentially, what happened first? And then ideally, what should happen next? Who should be involved? And what should be the outcome? After that discussion, our next step was to map it out. And I’m a visual person, so for me it was using diagrams to build that out. But if you’re more of a verbal person, it may be that you’re going to write it out as an outline in Word, whatever works for you, but it’s really a case of putting it on some surface to map it out to help you see the sequence. You wanna identify the pieces that do and do not work. And I really can’t stress this enough. We found from experience, there was a number of pieces in their process that really just were inefficient, either they were redundant or visibility was really something that was needed not to have someone in an approval as a critical stakeholder. So don’t automate for the sake of automating it. Think about what pieces of the process work and automate what works so that your automated process really is efficient, but it does what needs to happen and you’re not just taking those bottlenecks into Workfront. Once you solve for that, it really is a case of translating each step in your workflow into a Workfront equivalent. And I often think of this kind of like if you were remembering high school language classes where you would translate a sentence or a phrase from English into the language you’re studying. It really is the same case where you’re taking your mapped or your outlined workflow and saying, okay, what would that mean in Workfront? Does it mean we’re gonna use a routing rule? Does it mean we need to add a different additional stage into our approval process? Is it another phase or is it another stage in that approval process? Once you have the core process mapped out, then tackle the contingencies. And what I mean by contingencies are the what ifs and things that can happen. So for us, it was a case of, okay, well, what if the proposal is not accepted in the first round? What does it look like if we reject it? Or what does it look like if the program manager from the channel company accepts a proposal but the regional marketing manager doesn’t? What happens? What if everybody approves it but when we send it to our stakeholders because in a segregation program, a specific type of content, they do not approve? What does that look like? We found it was best to tackle the contingencies after that core process was built because it just made more sense. We were not getting paralyzed by going down rabbit holes of what about this and what about that? This didn’t work this time or this one-off situation didn’t work. Because we have the core process in place, it was a lot easier to see the most efficient approach for dealing with those contingencies or what if situations.

Once you have everything built, you’re still not done we found. To keep going, we found going through this that it made sense for us to establish a regular cadence to revisit the process because not only does the process evolve over time like any marketing process, but also we were able to see when we translated the client’s process into an automated workflow and work fund, we were able to see additional opportunities to get more efficient, to streamline and optimize more. So by making a regular six month cadence to come back and review on what’s working, what’s not, what do we need to add in, it really makes sure, it really ensures that our process and our workflow is in line with the client’s needs and their partners are being given the best possible experience.

We also found it helped to gather feedback both from our client and from their partners whether it’s where do you guys see the bottlenecks or what’s coming up that’s not in our process, what are we not accounting for. Gathering that feedback was critical. So we’re not just working on our perspective when we’re looking at any optimizations or revisions we might do in that workflow or the approval processes. And we also thought, as I mentioned, we’d go establishing this regular cadence to review even at that cadence or on a weekly or monthly basis, continue looking for any other opportunities to streamline further. It really was a case we found that you’re not one and done when you’re building the workflows and when you’re building the approval processes, things always can be changed. And then we find once all that information is in, the feedback is then we recommend revising and optimizing based on those recommendations and evolve leads. And then you continue doing that process, whether it’s coming back at another six months revisiting it. If you find something happens before your cadence where there’s major changes in the organizations in the process, of course, that cadence can go further than that.

All right, I hope I haven’t taken up too much of the time. Again, if you have additional questions, I direct you to the LEAP presentations. I hope we have some time to go through some questions. If not, please reach out on the community boards or you can connect over LinkedIn rather. And thanks so much. I’m gonna turn it back to you now, Brett. Thanks, Katie, I appreciate it. Go ahead and if you stop sharing, I will start sharing. Yes, you are.

Got it. Okay. And there was one question there from Monique. She asked about how many different marketing managers do you have and do the names change often? Really wondering more from a maintenance perspective to set that up. Great question. We started out with four and there was some change within the client group. The marketing managers, I believe now we’re at six and there has been some fluctuation in that. So that really was a case of getting the heads up from the client and then going in, setting up additional user accounts for those folks. And it did also mean going into the workflows and the approvals and making the necessary adjustments. Right, right, thank you. I do see there’s another question here, but what I wanna do, I wanna make sure we have plenty of time for our group discussions and we’ve got this scheduled for 30 minutes. So if we can take that question about leveraging the Q routing rules and put it into our group discussion in the community, I’ll try to make sure that that gets in there as well so that then we can answer it that way if we don’t get to it in the smaller groups. So what we’re gonna do next, we’re gonna break into smaller group.